The BBC has cancelled its daytime soap series “Doctors” after 23 years. I actually remember orbiting some executive 24 years ago, when it was being planned and I was told off the record that the BBC was going to do a new soap that was either about a medical practice or, I think, lawyers.

It was a quarter of a century ago so I let myself off being unsure whether the alternative had been lawyers, but I can’t let myself off for not remembering who the exec was. It could have been Mal Young, who I interviewed for Radio Times when he was head of drama, but while he seemed a nice guy, he was really steeped in soaps to the exclusion, I felt at the time, of other drama.

Sometime around then, I wrote for a UK soap called Crossroads but was fired for the flimsy reason that I was crap at it. What they needed, I couldn’t write and what I both could write and loved to write, they didn’t want. I got them to reverse the order of two scenes in the mandatory story breakdown I was given, but I think that was my sole contribution to the show.

Doctors was different, though. While technically a soap, it also had a story of the day. Every episode would be some mixture of the continuing drama of these doctors and other medical staff, and one complete story. As a writer, you’d be told the usual huge amount of what you had to do with the continuing storylines, but the story of the day was all yours. I mean, it had to be approved, there were constraints, but you were creating characters, you were creating story, it was a lot freer and therefore, to me, more interesting.

Interesting enough that this executive recommended I try out for the show back whenever it was. I truly do not remember how I blew it, but I did.

And I also cannot, cannot recall how I blew it again a few years later when I got another go. This time I have a memory of being in the Doctors offices, I want to say that I was taking a typing test, but whatever it was, whatever I did, I failed.

I’m not doing very well for recollection today, and unfortunately that was a problem on the third time I tried to get to write for Doctors.

This time I’m shaky on when it happened – it was at least ten years after the second go – but I do remember everything else, I just can’t tell you it all. What happened was that I met a new producer on the show, I obviously said all the right things, he got me writing up ideas for the story of the day, and the wham, it all stopped.

What I presume happened was that he’d pitched me to the show’s executive producers somewhat later than he’d implied, they had someone look up their “Blew It” database and said no, not again. That does not sound remotely likely, except that officially Doctors was a training show for new writers. It wasn’t, it unfortunately never was, but this was the official line and it does seem likely that there would be things the show could point to as proof that it was really hot on new writers.

If it’s true that there is such a database or something like it, I’d have appreciated this producer checking it before I wrote him twenty detailed plots. (I’ve used two in plays since.) But then equally this producer would have really, really liked me to have told him that I’d tried before. I didn’t mention it because it never occurred to me: one failed pitch at least a decade before, another failed pitch back around the year 2000, it did not enter my head.

I felt very bad about that and I even had the impression that I’d caused this new producer some problems.

A few months ago, incidentally, he and I were both judges on a Royal Television Society Awards panel and we met on a Zoom call. He mentioned being very fond of his time on Doctors, I didn’t mention my blowing it.

For all its story of the day, Doctors was a soap and I’m just not a soap writer. I shouldn’t have even tried out for it, they were right not to use me. I think the obvious reason to pitch was that at times it’s been the chief route in to TV for writers, but there’s also that the show is made in Birmingham, in the West Midlands, where I live. It’s our soap.

When the news that it was cancelled broke this week, my first and continuing thought is for friends who are writers on the show, for people I don’t know who are writers on it, and for all that crew and cast who are abruptly out of work. The BBC says that the cancellation is for budget reasons but that it’s okay, all of the money will be still be spent on shows in the West Midlands, so that’s fine. Except that it isn’t. Even if the money stays in drama — the BBC keeps worryingly mentioning that the cooking show MasterChef is moving to the Midlands — then it will always cost less to make one more episode of an existing show than to create a new one. So there will be fewer hours of drama, there will be fewer opportunities for writers, actors, directors and all.

Oh. Grief. I really thought my memory was astoundingly poor today, but I have recalled something. That fact about it costing less to make one more episode of an existing show, I know it was Mal Young who told me that. It’s called the slot cost: how much does it cost to fill a particular hour in the schedule, or half hour, with a show. Whatever the figure is, it’s less when you extend an existing series instead of a new one because there are no startup costs, no extended development time.

Anyway, if my first thought was for the writers, my second with this. I’ve decided I’m never going to try pitching to write for Doctors again.